Desserts

I love dessert. I say this again and again. All kinds of desserts: cakes and cookies and donuts and pies and ice cream and tortes and fruit and custards and … The list is never ending. There is not a dessert that I won't eat.

With liking so many desserts is, well, my waistline. I can eat way more desserts than my body is happy with. All in moderation is the name of the game. To that end, Husband keeps me in line and makes satisfying AND healthy* desserts.

* Healthy is no added additives or preservatives. There is fat and sugar in our desserts. We do not believe in low-fat additives of fakeness. Let's just be clear on that! :-)

So, Husband made pies. Strawberry during strawberry season which was late-June. And Blueberry during blueberry season which was July. Both were sweetened with agave nectar. Both had homemade pastry tops with organic butter and unbleached organic flour. The blueberry pie even had a touch of spelt flour tossed in.

Both pies were delicious and satisfying. Give me my desserts. Even when they are healthy options.

Garlic

At this year's Carp Garlic Festival, we bought 40+ bulbs of garlic. All different kinds of garlic: some hot, some mild, some peppery, some that tasted like grass. Yes, grass. The intention is to plant some of the bulbs in our own garden, and most of it is to eat.

We bought all different kinds: Spanish Roja - our favourite! - Music, Persian Star, Prairie Purple, and other kinds we don't know the names of.

Garlic is a cinch to grow.* Garlic grows much like tulips: plant the bulb in fall and come springtime, the little green sprouts will be the first things you see poking out of the ground.

We have been growing garlic for 4 years, and last year we had our own garden garlic last from harvest time - August - through until May of the following year. We didn't have to buy garlic from the grocery store! Our fresh garlic kept for all those months, in a paperbag, in a cool dark place. We will be doing the same with the fresh garlic we bought this year: storing it in a cool dark place, in a paperbag, and checking it every month or so for softspots.

We have not bought garlic from the grocery store in many years. The trouble with grocery store garlic is that it is often grown in China and shipped around the world. So by the time it is bought and arrives in your kitchen, it is old and dry, and usually tasteless. And what kind is it? Is it hot, peppery, grassy? Who knows. Grocery store garlic is only ever labelled as "garlic."

Try growing your own garlic. It's easy, requires almost no care, and you will notice the difference immediately with the first meal you make. You will wonder why you didn't do it before. If you don't have space to grow your own, buy freshly grown garlic. Fresh garlic makes such a difference to the foods you cook.


*This is not a garlic growing how-to. There are much better how-to's available on the web.

Reducing salt

One of the common themes that will come up frequently is the necessity to cook for yourself in order to control the amount of crap that you consume. Pre-packaged foods contain tremendous amounts of salt, fats, sugar, and chemicals that our bodies don't need. The more we eat them, the more our bodies want them, becoming addicted to them physiologically.

Salt is one of these over-used ingredients in pre-packaged foods that, the more we eat, the more we want. Our commitment to healthy eating started with the effort to reduce our salt consumption. It didn't start with trying to lose weight. Nice added bonus maybe, but not the primary motivator.

You just try to cut back on salt and see just how hard it is. Salad dressing, BBQ sauce, ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, whole tomatoes, pre-made muffins & cookies, salsa, hot chocolate mix (!!!!), ice cream, bread, juice ... The list goes on: "healthy" foods just as much as junk foods are packed with salt and other crap. Salt is pervasive and insidious in every single food around us. So how do we reduce our consumption?

We committed to cooking our own foods and not buying pre-made foods. We started small. The easiest things to eliminate were boxed pre-made food. We started making our own bread, salsa, salad dressing, cookies and muffins. It was better for us anyway, we could make exactly what we wanted! Other groceries were harder: what about mustard and mayonnaise and canned tomatoes? Some things we just had to reduce our intake, like mayo and mustard.

We started canning our own vegetables, particularly tomatoes. We make all kinds of canned tomatoes: roasted, oven-dried, and canned, no salt no sugar no oil added. Bought directly from the farmers market and 2 hours later, we have our own salt-free tomatoes.

Homemade tamales

Tamales are one of my favourite foods of all time. They are so light and fresh and I can taste every ingredient in them. Timmer makes them with fresh corn niblets - not from a can - and that adds alot of texture to the dough. He puts all kinds of different fillings in them. Sometimes it is cheese, cheese and green peppers, peppers and onions, chicken, beef, pork, and combinations thereof.

The ones above were chicken and cheese and onion. They were wrapped in real corn husks saved from the summer corn season and frozen in a Ziploc baggie. The tamales were steamed in the pressure cooker, which cuts down on the cooking time hugely!

The salsa was made from scratch. A green semi-hot salsa was made from jalapenis and tomatillos. The tomatoes are from our little vegetable garden and the tomatillos were from the locally-grown farmers market. Also served with steak (more on the beef in our freezer in a future post), tomato & tomatillo salad with homemade lime & organic olive oil and cilantro and garlic dressing, and organic apple juice. :)

That's the point of all of this: Timmer goes to the effort of making all of this fresh, local, good tasting and good for us food because otherwise I would be eating food from a jar or a box. I want sugar and salt and fat all the time. That is why my body craves. But the only way to re-train and re-learn how to eat well and eat good foods is to give my body foods that are good for it and foods that I love each and every meal.

My body, and my brain, like it.

And tamales are definitely one of those foods.

Challenges

So you want to try and make your diet healthier? Good luck with that. There are several substantial challenges that will make it more difficult:

• Diet trends are usually based on vast over-simplifications of nutritional needs, and not maintainable over the long term, and certainly not beyond when they are inevitably debunked.
  
• Government food regulation will always be several years behind the latest science, and heavily influenced by industry interest groups. Food labeling is only of minimal help, with several key data points missing.
• Food producers' and retailers' health claims cannot be considered credible. These companies are trying to sell products. The health claims on them are merely marketing messages, and how true they are is somewhat beside the point. "Healthy" food is also generally more expensive, as retailers see it as a value-add for which they can charge extra.
  
• The science of nutrition is a vast field with new discoveries being made daily (and old discoveries being invalidated almost as often). There is no way the average person can be expected to maintain a strong understanding of how different foods affect our overall health.

So to summarize: the diet people are against you, the government is against you, companies are against you, and science is against you. Those are some pretty intimidating opponents to say the least. It kind of makes all this pressure to eat healthy seem like a bit of a kick in the head, when the institutions that are supposed to help us are conspiring to make us less healthy.

I plan to write more about each of these challenges in the near future. But the plain truth is that eating well is hard and it requires real work.

The beginning.

This is a blog about beginnings. About food. About commitment and dedication.

I'm k. I love food, always have. I love healthy food and unhealthy food. And Timmer loves healthy food more than unhealthy food. Our dedication to each other, and to food and healthy eating - mostly - and local eating and gardening has meant that I have lost 100 pounds over the past year.

This blog is about a journey: a journey into finding less fat, less chemicals, less unhealthiness. And finding more happiness, joy, dedication and health. All through food and love.

Timmer does most of the cooking. We are both 100% dedicated to healthy eating.

I will definitely write more about my journey. But for now, this is the beginning.

We will both write about this journey, and post pictures of the food Timmer cooks.

/k.